Hacker News Reader

Comment by camiller | Hacker News Reader

'legit users'

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't get an email intended for someone else, often including personal information, due to a mistyped email address. Whoever decided that email verification was a poor user experience needs to be hit in the head with a shovel after he digs the appropriate sized hole.

If you know Catherin (PA) let her know her round trip to vegas is confirmed

Carolyn's (NYC) open table reservation was canceled by the restaurant.

Different Carolyn (CA) needs to correct email address with the walnut creak school district.

Possible the same Catherine (PA), your financial advisor needs a distribution form filled out.

Clint (OH), your repair at Kay jewelers in Akron is done.

Ann (FL), Thank you for scheduling an online appointment with Conley Subaru

sigh, you get the idea

Edit: Oh, and I'm going to start canceling Open Table reservations that show up in my inbox.

View on HN

What's even more annoying is that some sites ask for verification, but then proceed to email you stuff even if you don't click verify. Someone in Australia created an Apple ID using my email. I ignored the verification, but then I got a bunch of purchase receipts from them later.

What I really wish for is a link in emails that say "I am not the intended recipient of this letter." Normal mail works like that. You can ask the United States Postal Service to only deliver mail that has your name on it, and if you send back mail with someone else's name they will add that person's name to a database that says the mail is undeliverable.

I don't want to mark these organizations as spam, but that's basically what they are to me. I've started using the password reset to log in and change the email preferences so I don't get these emails anymore.

You better watch out, that's probably a felony depending on where you live.

I suppose there may be some sort of anti-hacking law that could be twisted to fit this case, and if the cops came to my door over it I'd definitely hire a lawyer before I said anything. I somehow doubt if I'd be charged with a felony for accessing an account that is registered under my name and email address and turning off email notifications, especially since I've tried everything else I could think of to stem the tide, including emailing support, etc.

Plus, this individual who keeps signing me up lives in Australia. I cannot imagine our system is so dysfunctional that both the United States and Australia would agree that a) this is a criminal offense, and that b) it would be worth going through the effort of extraditing me to face justice.

I mean, I haven't even received another password reset request from those websites I logged in to fix that issue, so I half imagine that person is using my email address as a plausible address for email they don't care about.

I understand what you mean, but I don't think I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. The few personal emails I've gotten with financial details (gym membership bills, etc) I've responded letting them know about the mix-up and they've been more than happy to fix the issue. Feel free to say I told you so when I end up in a jail full of kangaroos though.

I had the same problem with someone signing up for an Apple ID with my email address.

I even tried calling Apple to get them to cancel the account, but they wouldn't let me because I couldn't answer any of the security questions on the account!

The guy on the phone acknowledged that of course I can't answer them, because I didn't create them, bit their policy forbids them from doing anything without the security questions...

Man, now I'm wondering if this is some sort of violation of the CAN-SPAM act. My blood pressure goes up a little every time I get one of these emails and it doesn't have a way to unsubscribe if you aren't the legitimate recipient. Considering the companies that spam me the most with this irrelevant crap are Apple and Wal-Mart, I would feel 0% bad if they lost money over this practice.

Quick Edit: I just read the Wikipedia page, and individuals cannot bring suit against spammers (using CAN-SPAM in any case). Which is a shame really, because spam is really really annoying.

Instagram does this. They let anybody sign up for an account using any email address, and the account is immediately live. While they send a verification email, you don't have to click on it to still use the account. And most likely if you hadn't signed up for the service you'd think it's a phishing attempt and ignore it anyways.

I found this out the hard way when someone else had created an account under my email address and because some of my friends had uploaded their address book, my friends were following this stranger, perhaps thinking it was me. When I eventually did choose to sign up, I had to jump through a bunch of hoops just to be able to use my own email address.

As someone with an unusual name (used for my public-facing email address) and who uses a fairly unusual email for personal stuff... that's pretty different from my experiences. I've never ended up with someone else's mail at all.

That's a solid argument for business cards with vCard QR codes as I see it. Or a pack of stickers with QR codes that you could slap on whatever documents you needed.

It's too bad QR code adoption is so horrible. I'm just as guilty of it as anyone else, I assume that any QR code is probably just some marketing thing.

But vCards seem like one of the very legit use-cases. Now that I am imagining using stickers and never filling out my contact info on a form again, I realize that's definitely a world I want to live in.

> As someone with an unusual name...and who uses a fairly unusual email for personal stuff... that's pretty different from my experiences. I've never ended up with someone else's mail at all.

I think it's more likely if you use an initial in your email address. I have a fairly unusual last name, but I used my first initial to create my gmail address, so I regularly get stuff meant for a couple of other people.

Business cards or sheets of stickers are not going to solve this problem. The former is not universal, and you're not going to get enough adoption for the latter (do you really want to carry them around in case you need to put your email on a form?).

The only solution that might actually work is to put some kind of financial penalty on certain classes of email sender to incentivize reasonable levels of validation.

> do you really want to carry them around in case you need to put your email on a form?

Yes. Or my name/address/phone number. It's essentially a machine-readable address label, the email is just one part of the vCard.

Do you people really not keep a book of stamps in your car? Such inconvenience!

I could overload my pockets carrying around all kinds of special purpose labels and stickers, and track my stock of them so I don't run out....or I could carry a pen.

> Do you people really not keep a book of stamps in your car?

No, why would I do that?

> Whoever decided that email verification was a poor user experience needs to be hit in the head with a shovel after he digs the appropriate sized hole.

That's why you get send the verification email first, when creating the application user, and don't do anything until the email is verified.

The flow should be:

User: Please give me an account; my email address is jim@example.invalid

Server: I have sent an email to jim@example.invalid

Server → jim@example.invalid: Please go to https://server.invalid/register?token=KDU6dG9rZW4xOWppbUBleG...

User: visits URL, completes registration

That is what I was trying to say. Apparently there is some number of designers that believe that that whole email verification process is too much friction for registering a user, so they simply opt not to do it at all.

How generic is your email address? This has literally never happened to me (to my recollection).

I have [first-initial][last-name]@gmail.con.

My last name is pretty uncommon, but there are at least a thousand of us or so in the US.

I probably get a dozen emails a month to people who are not me (not counting all the ones that end up in the spam folder after I'm on a damn list).

Susan. Stephen. Another Sam. So many damn S. Lastnames around.

On occasion I've tracked the people down. I've forwarded their emails if they seem important. And whenever I ask that they be more careful and memorize their own email address, they get defensive and tell me someone else made a mistake.

Buddy, this email was was an automated response from a computer after you signed up for something. No, it did not just randomly decide to send to my @gmail instead of your actual @yahoo address. YOU just don't know your own email.

The real problem is that you are all on the same email provider.

If we didn't have a monoculture in email providing, this would be far less of an issue.

Do you think yahoo and Gmail are the same email provider?

Enough people clearly do -- they think that all email addresses end in @gmail.com, even if they check their email at yahoo.com. Because we have an email monoculture.

I have (first initial)(mid initial)(last name) at gmail. Same as my HN id. And a very common last name! 16 months into my first job out of University I got a call from a headhunter intended for the other Chris Miller sitting 2 cubicles away from me. At my second and fourth jobs there were also other Chris Millers. And from my list of examples, most all have the same last name.

4 days into university, the first time I logged in to the email account, I had several messages waiting for me, all intended for the same person, the best of which was:

"Hi X. The £80 million for the new biomedical building is approved, please make the transfer ASAP."

It turned out I had the same unusual name as the most senior financial officer.

This has never happened to me with any email address. Is yours really generic or easily typed by mistake?

I have an uncommon name spelling and I still get misdirected emails.

Not to the extent of the above, but for instance, last year I received someone's job offer in Colorado. I did respond to the sender to let them know of the mistake of course.

same here. apropos xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1279/

My most entertaining email yet was a group thread that kept track of a young missionary's progress as he traveled through South America. He's home now, so I don't get weekly updates anymore :( I almost miss it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com